In a recent study by Surepayroll on over 19000 consumers, it was found that, on an average, 68% shoppers abandon their online shopping carts. More than 50% of the surveyed users, attributed unexpected costs at checkout as the major reason for not completing their purchase. The second most common reason was that they were just browsing and didn’t really have a purchase intent. To find out how to reduce the alarming cart abandonment rate of your website, checkout the info-graphic below Why online shoppers abandon their carts

The Company Drukwerkdeal is an online printing shop based out of the Netherlands. They deal in a variety of photo products ranging from clothing, corporate gifts, presentations and cutlery to a whole new variety of Christmas-theme gifts like cards, posters and calendars. The website has a nice warm feel to it owing to all the colorful products they have for offer. To push more sales from their product pages, Paul at Drukwerkdeal decided to optimize them using Visual Website Optimizer. He went through a number of product pages and realized that the cross-selling message on the pages was not very convincing. And it could just be doing them more harm than good. This is how one of their product pages looked like (notice the links given in green under product description with an intent to cross sell): The Test Paul decided to test removing them and see what effect this…

The Company Harvard Business Services is a Delaware-registered agent and helps people incorporate their companies in Delaware. They also help their clients form LLCs and corporations and assist with filling their franchise taxes. To encourage more people to buy their services they decided to redo the navigation bar on their homepage. With that in mind, they tweaked certain tabs, did away with some and also introduced a new tab. The goal was to get more people to click on the tabs, engage them with the website and ultimately make them buy. On the original homepage, there were 10 tabs namely — Home, Get Started Now, Our Services, Compare, Learning Center, Blog, Make a Payment, Videos, About Us and Contact Us. This is how it looked: In the variation, they made a couple of changes: The “Compare” tab was renamed to “Compare Prices” “Get Started Now” was renamed to “Form a…

Company Background Hotel Institute Montreux is an international institute of hospitality and hotel management in Switzerland. They offer various undergraduate and postgraduate courses in hospitality and business management. The Test The primary lead generation avenue on HIM website is the ‘Receive your free brochure’ page. Originally, the page had a form where a prospective candidate had to fill in the details and request for a free brochure. Here’s how the original form on the lead generation page looked like: HIM assigned the responsibility of improving conversions on their lead generation page to their digital agency The Reference. After evaluating various elements on the website, The Reference found that though HIM had a lot of good testimonials on their testimonials page, there were none on the lead generation page. Spotting an opportunity there, they decided to run a split test on the lead generation page. The hypothesis behind this was to…

Ever found yourself puzzled with a sudden spike or drop in test results? Did it finally take you hours of brainstorming and discussions to figure out what caused the change? Now you can avoid all that hassle by simply adding notes to your graphs. VWO allows you to annotate your graph reports with relevant notes to make your analysis more meaningful. Think of these as sticky notes on your graph reports. You can use these annotations to add comments, mark important events and even add relevant links to your graphs. Let’s say you are the optimization expert with a large software product company. To get more users for your product, you are running a campaign on your ‘sign-up’ page with a goal to improve conversions. Meanwhile, your marketing team decides to launch a well-targeted newsletter campaign that directs visitors to the sign-up page. The awesome campaign results in a sudden…

This is a follow-up post on the VWO webinar, which was conducted on October 29th, 2014. Since there were many questions that Christian couldn’t address during the webinar from our live audience, he took out time to answer each one of them later and we’re extremely thankful to him for the effort. You can scroll down to see the Q&A. For those of you who couldn’t attend it, here are the quick details of the webinar: Topic: 8 Checkout Optimization Lessons Based on 5+ Years of Testing Presented by: Christian Holst, Baymard Institute Christian Holst is the Co-founder and Research Director at the Baymard Institute. He’s the author of the E-Commerce Checkout Usability and Mobile E-Commerce Usability research reports. He’s a contributor at Smashing Magazine and is also a regular speaker at conferences, like Mobile Commerce World, Smarter Web Strategies, and many others. Hosted by: Siddharth Deswal, VWO Register here…

We asked online shoppers what were their biggest pain points, what made them purchase right away, what made them come back to their abandoned carts, how social networks influence their purchase behavior, and much more. We got some pretty amazing insights which will help eCommerce stores optimize their business strategies. If you want to read the full report, click here, else proceed to the infographic. Click to get the full image Want to share? Embed this code:

With more than $262 billion in annual spend last year and the figure projected to touch a massive $370 billion in 2017, online shoppers are the most important piece of the eCommerce jigsaw. And as these consumers mature, converting them to customers can become increasingly difficult. So VWO set out to survey more than 1,000 online shoppers to find out what catches their attention, what frustrates them and, most importantly, what makes them “buy” in 2014. We got our hands on some really interesting consumer insights, particularly around how to turn cart abandoners into customers. In this post, I will summarise 5 insights derived from the report. If you want to check out the rest of the data, get the full report here (It’s free). I hope this information will help brands and eCommerce stores to optimize their communication and business strategies to better serve the rapidly evolving customer. 1. Retarget with discounts to boost conversions According to the survey results, a massive 54% of online shoppers said…

The Company Muc-Off started in 1994 as a manufacturer of cleaning products for bikes. As of today, they deal in a large range of cleaning products for electronic goods, apparel and motor vehicles as well as a new range for fitness goods. To improve the conversion rate of their website, they hired Spot Studio, an international digital agency focussed on developing web solutions that generate profits. Spot Studio did a number of tests that improved the conversion rates of various entities of their website. In this case study we will talk about how Spot Studio increased the conversion rate of category page of Muc-Off’s online store. The Test For one of their A/B tests, Spot Studio decided to tweak the design of the category page. Their goal was to increase product views and maximise sales. The original web design featured information about Muc-Off at the user’s eye level. The purpose…

Product pages are the doorways that lead to conversions and revenue for an eCommerce store. A good product page plays a pivotal role in taking a customer from just browsing to actually adding the product to the cart. Most eCommerce websites, therefore, invest a significant portion of their time and money in making their product pages more attractive and persuasive. But then, how do you do this? Essentially, it comes down to creating a great User Experience for your customer. An effective User Experience (UX) requires relevant and useful information designed in a manner which takes the customer seamlessly through the buying process. In this blog post, we are going to talk about 15 product page elements that add to the UX for your product pages and makes them high-converting. You will be familiar with most, if not all, of these. My intention here is to create a short checklist for every element that you can…